Category: AP Iran

Election 2013: A Founder of the Revolution Is Barred From Office, Shocking Iranians

The decision on Tuesday to bar the presidential candidacy of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a founding father of the revolution and a former president, shocked Iranians, particularly those among the 70 percent of the population that is under 35 and grew up when he served in many leading positions.

The exclusion of Mr. Rafsanjani and another thorn in the conservatives’ side, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, could foreshadow even greater repercussions, analysts and commentators said.

Barring further surprises, the winner of the June election will now be drawn from a slate of conservative candidates in Iran’s ruling camp, a loose alliance of Shiite Muslim clerics and Revolutionary Guard commanders. That would place the presidency under their control and would mark the first time since the 1979 revolution that all state institutions were under the firm control of one faction.

Analysts have long speculated — and some conservative clerics have confirmed — that the ruling faction is determined to abolish the office of president.

At the very least, the anti-climactic election campaign seems likely to further reinforce the alienation of the urban classes, which make up a large portion of the electorate and mostly gave up on politics after the suppression of the 2009 uprising following Mr. Ahmadinejad’s re-election, widely dismissed as fraudulent. A major boycott of the vote could further undercut the government’s already diminished legitimacy.

The remaining candidates reflect the different shades of gray that now make up Iran’s establishment, a coalition of conservative clerics and Revolutionary Guard commanders known as the traditionalists.

Three of the qualified candidates have direct links to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, a close adviser and a relative by marriage; Ali Akbar Velayati, his foreign policy adviser; and Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili.

A fourth, Tehran’s mayor, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, has long presented himself as a technocrat but last week boasted publicly of having beaten protesting students as a police commander.

All of them say they are ready to fix the economy by using a “revolutionary mind-set” and to solve the nuclear dispute with the Western powers by convincing them that Iran’s position is just.

The question remains of what President Ahmadinejad will do now that his protégé, Mr. Mashaei, has been sidelined. His legacy has been tainted by his close relationship with Mr. Mashaei, whom traditionalists call a “deviant” for what they view as his liberal ideas on Islam. Many in his faction have charges of corruption being drawn against them, and the Revolutionary Guards have already hinted that they are ready to do whatever it takes, including the arrest of associates of Mr. Ahmadinejad, if they feel the revolution is under threat.

The CIA in Iran, 1953 and 1979

For nearly five decades, America’s role in the military coup that ousted Iran’s elected prime minister and returned the shah to power has been lost to history, the subject of fierce debate in Iran and stony silence in the United States. One by one, participants have retired or died without revealing key details, and the Central Intelligence Agency said a number of records of the operation — its first successful overthrow of a foreign government — had been destroyed.

But a copy of the agency’s secret history of the 1953 coup has surfaced, revealing the inner workings of a plot that set the stage for the Islamic revolution in 1979, and for a generation of anti-American hatred in one of the Middle East’s most powerful countries.

The document, which remains classified, discloses the pivotal role British intelligenc officials played in initiating and planning the coup, and it shows that Washington and London shared an interest in maintaining the West’s control over Iranian oil

Iran's Censors Tighten Grip

Iran hasn’t been shy about its bids to monitor, filter and block content on the Internet. Now it has taken the next leap, turning online censorship into an institution.

In the past week, the government has announced it has formed a high council dedicated to cleansing the country’s Internet of sites that threaten morality and national security, launching what amounts to a centralized command structure for online censorship.

The Supreme Council of Cyberspace, created by decree last week by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, includes heads of intelligence, militia, security and the powerful Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as media chiefs.

In an annual report released Monday, the group Reporters Without Borders ranked Iran the No. 1 enemy of the Internet in 2012.

“We have identified and confronted 650 websites that have been set up to battle our regime—39 of them are by opposition groups and our enemies, and the rest promote Western culture and worshiping Satan, and stoke sectarian divides.” Mr. Shahriari said the council would also “focus and facilitate positive aspects of the Internet, like business and trade.”

“We will fight back and continue posting our opinions but our resources are very limited compared to what the Revolutionary Guards can do,” said a female student activist in Iran.

Iran's nuclear ambitions stalk presidential election

Intriguingly, many of the potential contenders so far have one thing in common – they have been involved in the international negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme.

Hassan Rohani, who was the country’s chief nuclear negotiator from 2003 to 2005, is the latest politician to tacitly acknowledge that he is intending to stand. Rohani told reporters in early January that it was time for a “new tone” in Iranian nuclear policy and that President Ahmadinejad had been too “confrontational”.

Ali Larijani, the current speaker of parliament, is another possible candidate with a nuclear past. In 2005, he succeeded Mr Rohani as Iran’s nuclear negotiator, but his moderate and pragmatic stand also put him at odds with the president and he resigned after two years.

Another name in the hat is Saeed Jalili, Iran’s current chief nuclear envoy. A tough negotiator who lost a leg during the Iran-Iraq war, Mr Jalili is keeping silent about his intentions.

Ali Akbar Salehi, the current foreign minister and former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI).

Read more at BBC

Ahmadinejad wants to be first Iran astronaut

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said he is ready to take the risk of becoming the first human being sent into space by Iran, national media reports.

“I’m ready to be the first Iranian to sacrifice myself for our country’s scientists,” the official IRNA news agency quoted him as saying on the sidelines of an exhibition of space achievements in Tehran on Monday.

My thoughts: farewell Mr. President. Earth would be better without ya.

LSE Lecture: Islam and the Politics of Resistance: the case of women in Iran

Recorded on 16 January 2013 in Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building.

Prominent Muslim feminist and peer Haleh Afshar will speak on the situation facing Iranian women in their country today.
Haleh Afshar (BA York, PhD University of Cambridge) teaches Politics and Women’s Studies at the University of York and serves as a Crossbench Peer in the House of Lords. In 2005 she was awarded an OBE for services to equal opportunities. She is also the Visiting Professor of Islamic Law at the Faculté Internationale de Droit Comparée at Strasbourg. She was born and raised in Iran where she worked as a journalist and a civil servant. She has served as the Chair for the British Association of Middle Eastern Studies and Chair of United Nation Association’s International Services.

Iran Faces Backlash Over "Morality Police" Spying on Coffee Shops

Since last year, the Islamic regime’s Basij forces have been targeting cafes because students and intellectuals meet there to share ideas often deemed “Western.” The Basij are under the command of Iran’s supreme leader and are tasked with carrying out a range of police functions—including suppressing dissident activity and making sure “morals” are not being breached. Previously the Basij were among a group of officers that in 2012 raided a reported 87 restaurants and cafes for “not following Islamic values,” such as by allowing women to smoke pipes in public.

Now, the authorities are turning to a new tactic: surveillance. This became apparent last week, when one of Tehran’s most popular cafes, Café Prague, closed in protest after state officials had tried to force it to install a series of cameras inside its premises.

Secor on Ahmadinejad at the UN

And yet much has changed in Iran since Ahmadinejad took office, in 2005. He came to power as the establishment’s candidate; he inherited an economy that was sick but not wasted, and a polity that was disillusioned but not completely cynical. Today, the President is an isolated figure. His relationship with the Supreme Leader has soured. Last spring, Ahmadinejad became the first Iranian President to be summoned to parliament for hostile questioning, his close allies were barred from running for office, and one of his top aides was sentenced to prison. The Leader has even toyed with the idea of abolishing the Presidency.

Ahmadinejad’s economic policies stoked inflation well before the latest round of sanctions, but the current situation is far more severe. In the past year, the Iranian rial has depreciated by two hundred and fifty per cent against the dollar; official statistics put inflation at about twenty-four per cent, which means that it’s probably higher; and the price of chicken has increased threefold, leading to a riot in the city of Neyshabur, and an outpouring of “chicken crisis” jokes on the Web. Under the circumstances, New York must have been a welcome respite for Ahmadinejad, and not only because of the ready availability of an affordable chicken dinner. Here he’s a big man; in Tehran, he’s approaching irrelevance.

Interview: 'The Twilight War' Between The U.S. And Iran

In The Twilight War, government historian David Crist outlines the secret history of America’s 30-year conflict with Iran. The book, based on interviews with hundreds of officials as well as classified military archives, details how the covert war has spanned five American presidential terms and repeatedly threatened to bring the two nations into open warfare.

Crist tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that there have been several incidents that have almost resulted in battle over the past 30 years.

Crist himself observed a close call between American and Iranian vessels in 2003, when he was a member of the special operations forces.

In Crackdown, Iran Confiscates Barbie Dolls

Malibu Barbie is under attack again – this time by Iranian government officials trying to keep Western culture off their screens and store shelves.

The Associated Press reports that in a recurring crackdown, Iranian police have closed down dozens of toy shops in the country for selling Barbie and friends and have begun confiscating the iconic dolls. Islamic leaders contend that Barbie, who is famous for showing off her freakish hip-to-waist ratio in glittery swimsuits, contradicts the modest dress code and gender roles promoted in Iran.

Islam and democracy: Uneasy companions

Islamist spokesmen and leaders of the revived Islamist mainstream are bending over backwards to give reassurances that they will promote a peaceful, pluralistic and tolerant version of Islam. The rights of women and religious and ethnic minorities will be respected, they say, and the people’s democratic verdict will be accepted if they lose elections.

Whatever their doubts, most democrats in the Arab world reckon that Islamists who say they will abide peacefully by the rules of the game must be allowed—indeed encouraged—to participate in mainstream politics: far better than forcing them into a violent, conspiratorial underground. All the same, the well of mistrust on both sides runs deep.

Many liberals still think the Islamists, however mild they sound today, are bent on taking over in the long run, would abandon democracy once they got into power and would use every sort of chicanery and violence to achieve their goal.

Two articles on the relationship between Islam and democracy in light of the 2011 “Arab Spring”

Iran and the United States in the Cold War

Few outside countries have more at stake in the evolution of Iran’s political situation than the United States, which has been in a state of open enmity with the Islamic Republic for more than three decades. Threats of Iran-backed terrorism, Tehran’s apparent nuclear ambitions, and its evident aim of destabilizing American allies—chiefly Israel—are perpetually high on the list of US concerns in the region. Why is Iran so important to the US? What explains the enduring animosity between the two countries? Answers to these and other questions about the United States’ position in the region today can be found by looking back to the Cold War.

Read more about US Cold War Policy in Iran (4 pages)

BBC & CNN on Iran

 
A note on checks and balances in Iran (Aug 2009)

Zakaria & Guests discuss how Iran will weather the Arab Uprisings of 2011

Zakaria & Soros discuss Iran 2011